What happened during my test drive of my "old" film camera? Olympus OM-1 first roll!
Saying our "see you laters" before she headed back to college after break. Bright full sun exposure.
My first roll of film through my "new to me" Olympus OM-1 was a fun experiment for sure. The camera didn't perform quite as well as I had hoped it would, but it may be an easy fix...we will find out!
Until that happens, I'll share my first roll, the good, the bad and the ugly lol.
All scans here are completely untouched for purposes of learning!
This was the second and third shot from the roll. Shot on a 50mm at 1.8, 1/500 and standard consumer Fuji 400 film. I had a love for Fuji film when I first started shooting so I wanted to give it a go again and see how it performed and if I still preferred the film over others.
Whereas these two images are overexposed, I like the colors in the even / soft lighting. I was still fiddling with the internal light meter that proved to completely non functional lol. I pulled out the old Sekonic from my early days, and it worked like a charm! I did utilize the "sunny 16" rule on a few shots throughout the roll, and that worked beautifully too! Now, being the camera is fully manual, I have switched back to the mode where I kind of know, or at least have a good general idea of where my settings should be without metering...in non tricky lighting anyway lol.
The white balance was quite a bit different on this interior car shot! I love it, and it shows you how much light matters, especially when shooting film and don't want to spend time post processing scans!
Experimenting both indoors and outdoors, even though my film speed was only 400, was very valuable. The picture on the left was taken with the same natural lighting as the photo below but yet rendered very different tones. Honestly, not sure why lol, so if you have ideas...lay 'em on me!!
Other than the extreme amount of dust in the lens, this photo looks like what I would have expected from indoor low light, with 400 speed film.
Love the puppy helping Gab design her project!
Aside from the lack of sharp focus, I love, love,love the tones in this photo. It is slightly overexposed (the brights), but overall, I like the image and the warm tones!
Here is where things went weird lol. Shot on a snowy day, lower light but metered perfectly with the Sekonic, yet I got red ntones, weird light leaks, AND this → weird phenomenon (on the right) 😂 . In hind sight, the images that were undefinable like the image on the right, the camera's film advancing mechanism was not working properly so I am thinking that really messed up the roll and maybe I somehow got a double, overexposed exposure. Regardless, super weird and unexpected!! Especially the red tones when we were out in very cool, even light... ¿
Taking the camera to finish up my film in Boulder Saturday, I shot only about 5 frames. Again, I was looking for variety in lighting, location and surroundings. This ended up being my favorite, taken from outside as the girls enjoyed some lunch in a local coffee shop (that yes, I wanted to go to because it's one of my two most favorite coffees ever lol). Performance = as expected.
That wraps up my "review" of my new old camera. I am going to be working on fixing the issues that I had with the camera to make sure that I'm getting what I want when I shoot! When I do, I'll most likely do a follow up blog about the changes! This content MAY only interest you if you are interested in film photography, but if the topic isn't interesting, I hope you enjoy the photos that came out of the adventure!!
Thank you for tuning in, second post of the new year, and I'm super stoked about what's to come!
Until next week....
💓